Well the time change has been nice, good to have the extra daylight after work. But spring weather hasn’t really arrived…and it is very much still winter in the mountains. I’m still approaching my skiing as though the Vancouver Island Loppet is on the agenda. Being that the race is 3 weeks away I spent the week focussing on volume, putting in lots of kms at low effort. Why do this so late in the season? Well, firstly it’s an excuse to ski more…I’m kinda liking gliding along the snowy trails, and secondly I’ve identified that my stamina has been lacking at recent loppets. I knew the 50 km Payak loppet was going to challenge my endurance but I was a bit surprised at how tiring the subsequent 30 km loppets felt. So I ended up skiing 4 nights this week, Monday through Thursday. Monday and Tuesday I skated for 1:45 and 2 hours, Wednesday was an hour of classic and Thursday was another 2 hours of skating. There was a ton of fresh snow Wednesday making it another of the nearly back-country skiing adventures in lots of soft snow with not much in the way of tracks…but good fun. Thursday was kinda cool in that the snow conditions were a bit slow at the beginning but as the night progressed the cooling temperature hardened up the trails making for quite speedy skiing…so much so that one particularly fast downhill corner was starting to freak me out, but I kept making myself take the corner at speed to get better used to it…fortunately I didn’t meet anyone coming the other direction. Saturday Katja, John and I skied Callaghan…and they had recently received something like 1.5 meters of fresh snow. The trails were in surprisingly good condition, although there was lots of variability in the snow at different parts of the trails. While Katja explored her new world of skate skiing, JG and I hit the trails on classic skis with JG quickly finding out that violet was not the right grip wax, before tackling the first big climb he stopped to apply some red wax. We met up with Terry and Woody (his dog) on Porters Glide and skied together for a while…until Terry scampered up a big hill at a wicked pace…I swear he actually accelerated when the hill got steeper. I stayed with him for a while, then fortunately noticed JG was nowhere to be seen as this is when he stopped to wax his skis…so this was the perfect excuse to let TL continue on without me…phew! JG and I continued on to Madelely Lake then returned by Norwegian Woods, along the way meeting up with Dan, Angela, Tom and Helen (and their friend Marie-Claire). Seems everyone was keen to take advantage of the good skiing offered by the late winter snowfalls. JG’s grip was starting to fade so we swapped to our skate skis. The trails were pretty good for skating except for some of the steeper hills where the snow was soft enough that our poles would penetrate deep into the snow providing an extra challenge to offset climbing the already steep trails. Eventually we made our way to “How it goes”, the upper trail system that takes us around Loon Lake…which required tackling another nasty climb. We called it a day a bit early, JG was feeling the effects his week of cycling everyday in the Arizona sun…some of his skiing specific muscles were rebelling against having been ignored for the past week. We met up with friends in the lodge while waiting for Katja to finish up her skiing…she’d swapped to classics for a bit after wiping out her skating muscles. Once again we finished off the day at Shady Tree in Squamish.
Originally I was planning to paddle today, but the 2 deg C morning temperature didn’t excite me so I dropped Katja off in Deep Cove to paddle with Jodi then continued on to Cypress. I haven’t often skied Cypress during daylight so took the opportunity to explore the upper trails. And guess what, to access the upper trails required tackling some big hills, some of which were quite steep. The trails were in excellent form…there is a real maze of trails up top, but they are all rather short. I returned on trails that took me to a place called West Lake…I must’ve descended for quite a while as I had to climb a massive steep hill to get back up to more familiar trails. I had to stop at least twice to rest while climbing this hill…I had no idea this trail even existed. I was surprised that the trails were not crowded despite the parking lot being very full. Perhaps the skiers are more spread out without the confines of the trails with lights, and there seemed to be lots of activity at the tubing park and there were lots of snowshoers scampering about.
Oh, and while driving the highway en route to the mountain an ambulance overtook the vehicles travelling westbound. Saw one moron who makes me question how our species has survived on this planet. Despite the long stretch of straight highway to allow us to see the approaching brightly lit up ambulance, this brown pickup stays in the left lane…eventually the ambulance changes lanes to pass on the right…the jackass proceeded to stay in the left lane the rest of the time I saw him. I hope the ambulance was heading to help this driver’s family member. If I could have a super power, it is times like this that make me wish I could make boneheads like this disappear, along with any genetic material passed on to future generations!